Of Ice And Men: A complete beginner's guide to professional hockey (Part 1)

Don't try to understand it. Feel it.

“Why watch overtime playoff hockey when you can simply snort cocaine and ride a motorcycle out of a helicopter?”

That’s hockey in a nutshell¹.

But what is hockey, really? What should you know about a sport that blends figure skating with lacrosse with that 1975 James Caan sci-fi classic?

During this month alone, literally hundreds of new subscribers came in. I couldn’t understand why. Surely it wasn’t because of this place. This Substack is, after all, about hockey in the South. I’m a Chicano from Texas in love with a Canadian sport rooting for mostly Finnish players. The algorithm must have broken in half. And then it dawned on me. I don’t follow basketball but I knew about the Mavericks. I knew about Luka Dončić. I’ve come to learn a lot about the trade itself thanks to really smart people who made it easy to understand why fans should have felt so betrayed by a bunch of fortune mongers.

So today’s post is for you. Yes you. Maybe you’re a Mavericks fan who wants to learn more about hockey. Maybe you’re not a Mavericks fan, and you want to learn more about hockey. Maybe you don’t care about Dallas at all, but you want to learn about hockey anyway. If hockey is not your first language, and you want to be able to speak it, today is your Duolingo lesson in it.

What follows will be a beginner/bandwagoner’s guide to hockey in the order I think is essential to understanding the game. This series will be divided into four sections. Today is an introduction to hockey as an experience, learning how to feel the game of hockey first and foremost, and what makes it different from other sports. Throughout the week, we’ll unpack the rosters/players (Part 2), the war on ice (Part 3), and the importance of gamestates and rules (Part 4). Nothing overwhelming and no fancy stats. Just hockey as I understand it, and hockey as I would present it to someone watching the sport for the first time.

So without further ado…

Hockey IS hard to follow. Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.

The first thing that people say about why they can’t watch hockey is that it’s hard to follow. How can you follow a sport where the most important object is the size of a beer coaster, and it can move at 100mph? Don’t let hockey fans gaslight you into thinking it’s easy. It’s not. Hockey players themselves can’t always locate the puck. Just look at this sequence below.

I’m jumping ahead here. After all, the ice itself and all those random markings deserve an explanation. We’ll get to those. For now, just know that part of hockey’s charm is that the action is not always clear. Chaos is part of the attraction. It’s not always neat or clean. If you learn to love that layer of filth, you’ll learn to love the sport.

However, you do get context clues. One shorthand for making things easier to follow is to focus on what the other players are doing. While this is a special situation below, for now just focus on the defenders. Their body language tells you everything you need to know; the way they shift in response to the change of possession and the direction their heads turn when puck carriers shift.

Here’s another shorthand: should the player with possession of the puck shoot or pass?

It always depends. The outcome of plays like this — whether the puck carrier decided to pass, or opts to shoot — can often be a coin flip.

Plays like these give you a better sense of puck movement itself. A lot of being able to watch hockey in a literate way is anticipating where that little mass of vulcanized rubber will be instead of where it is.

Why hockey is so different from other sports

Other sports are defined and constructed according to their metaphors for dominance. Dunks, grand slams, etc. Hockey has that too. Players move on skates to go fast, they have sticks to handle the puck so they beat a goaltender to hit the back of the net, and as long as the puck crosses the goal line inside the net more times than your opponent, you win.

The metaphors kind of stop there, though. There is a comic-book level talent on display, but hockey is also incredibly physical. There are hits, there is fighting, and even downright criminal behavior. And no, I don’t write that last sentence lightly.

Because of this, hockey is inherently hard to predict. Underdogs are much more live in the sport of hockey. We don’t really have dynasties anymore, and even the best players can go pointless in a game. Hockey’s more of a strong-link sport (like basketball) than a weak-link sport (like soccer), but not dramatically so.

However, while chaos is one strand of hockey’s DNA, the skills of the hockey player are unlike anything else. They can’t just be well-conditioned. They have to be well-conditioned and a sufficient skater. That sufficiency can be displayed in different ways. Here players can be fast, or they can be agile. They can be strong, or they can be light. They can also be slow. They also have to be sufficient with the stick. That sufficiency is also displayed in different ways as well. Some can shoot the puck well in order to finish plays. Some can pass the puck well to set up those finishers. Some can protect the puck well to control territory. There are a lot of very specific skills each player has to have. The best players have them all. Two players whose names you’ll hear a lot are Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon. They are extraordinarily fast players. But there’s a reason why their speed is so much more noticeable, and it’s because they can handle the puck at high speeds, and finish plays.

All of these skills exist in a game that is not governed by stable rules or repetitive patterns with immediate feedback to ensure that progress is linear, like chess. Instead, a hockey player’s skills exist in a game that has rules that sometimes change in gamestates that can operate as if there are no rules at all. This is not an understatement. Playoff hockey actually markets itself—”the war on ice”—this way. There is nothing repetitive about a hockey game either. No two games are ever alike. Hockey is the ultimate in wicked, rather than kind, performance environments.

The Beautiful Game

Hockey is a three-act sport. There are three periods, 20 minutes a piece. Each period contains three commercial breaks, not counting the single timeout that each team is allotted. The intermissions lasts between 15 to 20 minutes. Each team has a roster, typically three coaches (a head coach, supported by two assistance coaches on the bench), an on-site medical team, and the usual list of managerial positions.

Unfortunately, nobody knows this hierarchy better than Mavericks fans². 80 percent of the game, on average, takes place between five skaters trying to score and one goaltender trying to stop opponents from scoring (called even-strength). We’ll talk about the other 20 percent later this week (called special teams).

The regular season consists of 82 games stretching from October to April, and then the Stanley Cup Playoffs, which stretch from April to June. That last part might seem innocuous enough. “I get it. There’s a regular season and there’s the playoffs.” But playoff hockey is its own separate animal. It is hockey at its most reptile-brained. The intensity picks up in a way that practically re-structures the game itself. The rulebook is interpreted differently, the players play differently, and the coaches coach differently.

If you want to dig deeper into hockey’s history, I recommend this documentary.

For something with a lot less depth, but just as important, here’s a pretty famous children’s book that introduces kids to hockey.

Part II Preview

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the rosters themselves. Specifically how they work, what makes each position different, and a broad look at their responsibilities.

1. Compliments of Jon Bois in 2014

2. Also, if you’re a Stars fan who wanted to get into basketball because you’re a young person who simply wants to know more about basketball, there is no one who does it better than Iztok Franco at digginbasketball.